after the sunshine of my life betrayed me
by suitablyskippy
Summary: "Well, " says Suigetsu, as though, between the two of them, it is he who speaks as the voice of pragmatic, level-headed reason, "you're locked up, so I'm probably safe if you freak out. And talking to you can't be worse than three years in a tank, is basically how I'm looking at this." (Or: Team Taka kill time in jail, and life gets duller by the day.) [Gen, one-shot.]


[Cross-posted from AO3; originally posted there on 13/5/2014.]

.-.-.

* * *

It is sunrise, Juugo suspects, from the cool, brightening feel of the chakra thrumming through the world outside; it is sunrise, and he sits on the edge of his pallet bed, bare feet on the cold stone floor, hands on his knees. He looks at the opposite wall. The wall is dank and greenish stone. There is nothing particularly to recommend it.

Some hours pass.

The guards change over. There is nothing particularly to recommend that, either. He must have slept well, he supposes; at the very least, he is awake now, and he feels no worse than he might expect to, under the circumstances.

Some more hours pass.

Juugo blinks, slowly. An itch seems to have developed on the back of his heel. He rubs at it. Late afternoon, perhaps?

"Oi, Juugo - Juugo! Ju-u-u-ugo -"

Yes, late afternoon: far up above the subterranean dungeon levels he can feel the grey, ice-clear daylight falling on the snow.

"Are you even _awake_ over there? - hey, is the big guy next door awake?"

The samurai stationed on leftmost guard turns his head toward the cell beside Juugo's. His face is concealed, his breathing a heavy rasp through the respirator; he lays one gloved hand on the hilt of his wakizashi, and emanates lethal, voiceless hostility in Suigetsu's direction.

Suigetsu heaves an exasperated sigh. There is a thump, rather muffled. He might have flung himself onto his bed. He might not have.

Juugo clears his throat. "Did you want to speak to me?"

"You're awake? - the _fuck_, Juugo, were you ignoring me?"

"I was - thinking," says Juugo. He rubs his palms against his knees.

"_Thinking_," says Suigetsu, scornfully, but the indignation's simmered down. "Well, listen, I dunno about you but I'm bored as hell in here. You wanna talk or something?"

"Uh," says Juugo. "To - you?"

"You got a better suggestion?"

Juugo does. He doubts Suigetsu would be amenable to the idea of meditative, uninterrupted silence, however. "I suppose not," he says, instead, diplomatically.

"And it could be worse, right? Like - you're locked up, so I'm probably safe if you freak out."

Juugo concedes that this is, technically, true. "I don't really do that any more, though."

"Better safe than sorry," says Suigetsu, as though, between the two of them, it is he who speaks as the voice of pragmatic, level-headed reason. "Talking to you can't be worse than three years in a tank, is basically how I'm looking at this."

"Thank you," says Juugo.

"Not a compliment," says Suigetsu, immediately and unnecessarily.

A vision of the tranquil solitude Juugo had imagined to be his immediate future is vanishing, rapidly, a steady calm sucked away until in its place remains only a rather doleful sense of loss. "No," he says, and sighs. "No, I - believe me, I'm very much aware of that."

.-.-.

* * *

.-.-.

"We know that you've been travelling with Uchiha Sasuke -"

"I _hate_ him!" Karin howls. "I'll kill him! I'll shave off all his beautiful hair!"

"You've mentioned," says the miserable old Leaf nin across the table. "Look, we want -"

"His silky, lovely hair! Oh, _Sasuke_ - I just want to run my hands through it, if I could see him one more time - my dear, dear Sasuke -"

The interrogator steeples his fingers at his mouth. He's glaring at her.

"I'd kiss him till he _suffocated_!" Karin wails, for good measure, and promptly collapses onto the table, sobbing hysterically.

The chair across from her hers scrapes back. "Waste of time," her interrogator grumbles. The movement of his dry old chakra says he's standing.

"Could try torture?" suggests the guard, who is loitering on supervisory duties just inside the door.

"On a kid as crazy as that?"

Karin's wail tapers hurriedly off into an ugly snotty sound and re-emerges as great, shuddering gasps for breath: which, conveniently, are just noisy enough for eavesdropping through.

"You think we should just give her a break?"

"Don't imagine she's had many of those," the guard agrees, his tone sombre.

Someone takes her by the elbow. She wipes her nose in her sleeve and lets herself be hauled back down to her cell, sniffling more pathetically than any inmate _she_ ever escorted, down in the bleak dungeon heart of the experimentation chambers of Sound. And God knows, if any prison in Sound had been run as nauseatingly as this - as _compassionately_ as this - with as much taking-into-consideration-the-basic-human-wants-and-needs-of-its-inmates as this - the punitively severed heads would have been rolling from the very _instant_ Karin turned in the reports of her annual inspection to Lord Orochimaru.

The Leaf-nin are fucking amateurs. She's not even _slightly_ afraid for her life.

.-.-.

* * *

.-.-.

"Orochimaru, Kabuto, Sasuke."

Today there are five samurai outside their cells, hunched over the bright pieces of some Iron Country boardgame. All go still at the mention of Orochimaru's name.

"What about them?" says Juugo, guardedly.

"You gotta fuck one, team up with one, kill the other. Who'd you pick?"

The soft _clack_ of counters on the wooden board stops. Apart from the slow drag of air in the filters of the samurai's respirators, the dungeons have grown silent.

"That's - quite a personal question," says Juugo.

"It's a _game_," says Suigetsu, as though it should be obvious, as though it excuses anything at all. "C'mon, I'm only _in_ this shithole cos you ruined my escape plan - you fucking owe me, Juugo, okay?"

Juugo's not sure how he ruined Suigetsu's escape plan. He had thought Suigetsu ruined Suigetsu's escape plan, by bluffing so poorly he talked them both straight into a trap.

"Um," he says.

"_Personally_ speaking," says Suigetsu, his tone abruptly, breezily informational, "I'd fuck Sasuke, kill Orochimaru, and team up with Kabuto. But just, like - for a week or something, cos then I'd kill him too."

"Is that so," says Juugo, after a moment. He's not sure what else to say. He rarely is.

A sudden, dramatic sound effect - as perhaps of steel whistling through air - or air whistling between teeth - comes from the next cell. "You fucking _bet_. Chop him straight in half. Or - chop his legs off first - wait, wait, no, his _feet_, gotta take it slo-o-ow -"

Something sick is stirring in the back of Juugo's mind. He understands why Suigetsu might harbour some resentment towards Kabuto. Both of them were on the medical experimentation roster - he _really_ understands. But he's already hunched in the corner of his cell. He can't hide much further. He squeezes shut his eyes and presses his hands tight to his ears and thinks, determinedly, of the screeching chatter of the raccoons in Forest Country.

The rhapsody of violence next door rambles blissfully on. Outside their cells, the samurai resume their game, eyepieces glowing dully in the dungeon gloom.

.-.-.

* * *

.-.-.

"You _promised_ your cooperation!"

"I _am_ cooperating!"

Her interrogator slams his hands onto the table. "Then perhaps you could _answer our questions_?"

Karin slams her hands onto the table too. "I _am_!"

"Bursting into tears every time anyone mentions Uchiha is _not_ answering our questions!" bellows her interrogator, red-faced. His chakra is seething with frustration.

"Uchiha?" says Karin. She drops her furious scowl. She replaces it with a pitiful tremor in her lower lip. "You mean -"

"Oh, for _fuck's_ sake -"

"- Sasuke? My - my _Sasuke_?"

For a moment, her interrogator is still, staring at the far wall; and then he throws up his hands and says, in a tone of great finality: "No. No. You know what, I quit. I give up. You're beyond help."

"That murderous, cold-hearted _traitor_!" Karin flings her glasses to the table, the better to wipe her free-flowing tears. "That gorgeous bastard, I'll kick his fucking skull in! I _want_ him! I want him _dead_!"

.-.-.

* * *

.-.-.

"You awake?"

Juugo opens his eyes. The ceiling is dark.

The sound of noisy drinking echoes in the next cell. "Me, Sasuke, Karin. Hard mode. What d'you reckon?"

Juugo stares up at the dark ceiling for some time. The sharpness of the chakra he feels outside tells him it is night, frozen over and viciously cold.

"I'm uncomfortable answering that," he says, at last.

"Yeah? Well, if you ask _me_ -"

In a move of instant, remarkable fluidity, Juugo wedges his prison-issue pillow over his head and drags his sheets up to cover his ears, all in time to muffle any unpleasantly personal revelations from next door to a murmur.

The lack of response doesn't deter Suigetsu, and the endless chatty rhythms of one-sided conversation continue on, cheerful and indistinct. It's almost soothing. If they stay rotting down here for long enough, perhaps it _will_ grow soothing. Juugo is very familiar with the concept of coping mechanisms developed in confinement, but the thought of growing accustomed to Suigetsu's voice as lullaby is nightmarish enough to keep him turning restlessly all through the night.

.-.-.

* * *

.-.-.

Today it's the pink-haired kunoichi who's pulling up a chair to the bars at the front of her cell; and she _did_ save Karin's life, so Karin heaves herself reluctantly up from her bed to face her. She exhales in irritation while she does it, though. No point letting her think she's anything special.

"Karin?" says the girl. "I'm Sakura - it was me who healed you, you remember, after -"

"Yeah, yeah. I remember. What do you want?"

"Nothing - _nothing_," she insists, when Karin narrows her eyes. Her voice is even but her chakra's a fucking mess, a quivery, stressy pulse of tension. "I thought you could do with someone to talk to."

"Someone to talk to," Karin repeats, flatly.

The ceiling lights are shit, unflatteringly weak down here in the prisoners' basement, but Sakura looks washed-out all the same, exhausted and sickly pale. She takes a steady breath. "Someone who gets what you're going through," she says. "I mean - better than they do in T&I. You don't get much company down here, do you?"

Karin shoves up her glasses, scowling. "If you wanna know about Sasuke, you don't have to pretend you're asking about _me_."

It's starting to feel like the stress in Sakura's chakra is just her baseline state - nothing personal. She's not fazed by Karin. She's fazed by Sasuke, though: that quiver of tension just spiked, pink and tragic.

"I'm not," Sakura says abruptly. "Asking about him, I mean. Let's not talk about him."

"What if I _want_ to talk about him?" Karin demands.

Sakura blinks. "Do you?"

A version of reality instantly unspools in which Karin promptly does exactly what she ought to: collapse back onto her bed in ecstasy, seize up her carefully framed photograph of Sasuke, perhaps attempt making out with the smeary glass in a frenzy of deranged passion. It's an option. It's probably the best option. If it was literally anyone else in Leaf talking to her right now, she'd do it; if it was literally anyone else in Leaf, she'd already have _done_ it, and she wouldn't be sitting on the end of her bed, fiddling with the sheer fabric of her stockings, debating whether or not to go for it.

Sakura's still watching, kind and curious, waiting for an answer like whatever Karin's got to say actually _matters_.

"Maybe later," Karin concedes. "Give me a few minutes. Gotta work myself up to it, you know what I mean?"

"I do," says Sakura, and smiles at her: which would have been a capital offence, back when Karin ran the jails, but here doesn't seem to register even as an infraction of basic procedure. Leaf is one _seriously_ fucked-up village.

.-.-.

* * *

.-.-.

"Animal, vegetable, or mineral?"

"Mineral."

"Is it a sword?"

"You _bet_."

Juugo exhales. The days are beginning to lose their definition. He has seen nothing but this cell for weeks. For weeks, he has heard nothing but Suigetsu. He tips his head back against the wall. He allows himself to close his eyes.

"Well?" Suigetsu demands, and Juugo starts in surprise.

"What?"

"Are you gonna carry on playing?"

"But I guessed correctly," Juugo says. He picks his way cautiously through the words. "I guessed it was a sword."

"_A_ sword."

"Yes."

"_A_ sword," Suigetsu says again, the emphasis heavier still. "Didn't guess _which_ sword I was thinking of, did you?"

"Ah," says Juugo. He looks at his hands. They're on his knees. He probably can't pretend he's asleep again, not now he has already engaged. "Ah," he says again, stalling. "Well - I don't know much about swords."

"You serious? You should have _said_ something, damn!" The astonishment turns rapidly to a businesslike tone. "Well, don't worry about it. I can teach you everything you need to know."

"You really don't have to," says Juugo, after a moment.

"I _want_ to," Suigetsu assures him. From the next cell comes the sound of a cup being drained and then slammed down, decisively, on the stone floor. "Not like we haven't got time to kill, is it?"

A feeling of despondent resignation is creeping over Juugo. "That's certainly true," he says, glumly.

.-.-.

* * *

.-.-.

"I need the toilet," Karin announces.

"There's a bucket in your cell," points out one of the guards.

"Very funny," she says. It's her threatening tone. It works just as well as it used to on the other side of the bars. There are four Leaf nin loitering outside her cell today, but two of them are in the black uniform of the interrogation squad and she suspects they're just here for the portable heaters, and the endless rounds of low-stakes gambling her guards play at their rickety fold-out card table. Their game has stilled; a look flickers round between them.

"Fine," says one of them, in a voice of weary resignation. "Fine, alright. I'll take you. Don't bother trying to escape or anything."

"Like there's any point in freedom after the sunshine of my life betrayed me," Karin says, and taps her foot impatiently at her cell door, her photoframe tucked into the crook of her arm.

Keys in hand, the guard looks at it. "You're, uh - taking that with you?"

"Why? You wanna separate me from my beloved Sasuke?"

"What? - no! _no_, God - I didn't mean -"

"You _better_ not have," Karin snaps, and marches out to a sudden background hush of revolted, pitying murmurs. Whatever. She'll have time to patch up her brutally wounded pride when this bullshit gets her free again.

"C'mon," the guard says, even wearier than before.

She trudges after him to the staff toilets, down the hall and up the stairs and past the only window she's seen in the whole building that's not blacked out - past the view of a courtyard and another red-bricked building, a few glossy autumn trees. It's not impressive. It's the Leaf. If the Leaf _didn't_ have fancy-looking trees, then it might be worth noticing. She slams the door of her cubicle.

The arms of her glasses end in thin plastic sheathes. Rapidly she prises them free and resumes her work: shaving metal from the narrow, unprotected ends, squinting as she whittles them down. She's got razors, picks, needles; if anyone confiscates her photoframe, she'll have nothing. The small rasp of replacements getting scraped into shape is more than she's willing to risk in front of guards.

There's a sharpened point beginning to form by the time she decides to call it a day, packs her kit back inside the frame, kicks open the toilet door.

"Took you long enough," says the guard.

"A girl needs intimate alone time with her lover," says Karin. "Pretty hard for me and Sasuke when you're always _watching_ us, you know what I mean?"

The guard rubs his forearm across his eyes. He looks haunted. "I'm just gonna forget you said that," he says. "Back to your cell, kiddo. We'll get you lunch."

.-.-.

* * *

.-.-.

"Animal, vegetable, or mineral?"

"Animal."

"Fuck's sake, Juugo, _again_?"

Juugo hesitates. It seems unlikely to be a trick question. "Yes," he says.

A sound of disgust comes from the next cell. "I quit. I quit! You're too predictable. You gotta mix it _up_ sometimes, okay? You can't just keep picking animals - not _every_ single time."

"You pick a sword every time," says Juugo.

"So what?" snaps Suigetsu.

Juugo hesitates again. He isn't sure he understands what's going on. He does understand that he doesn't understand Suigetsu, though: but he has understood that for quite some time now. "I'm not sure what you're asking," he says, instead, diplomatically.

A huffing sound. "You're fucking weird. I bet it was some kinda bird. Was it a bird?"

It had been a sea lion. "Yes," says Juugo, in the interests of hastening along peace and quiet.

Another huffing sound. "_Exactly_. Just proving my point. Whatever, I'm gonna get some sleep."

The pallet bed beyond the wall creaks a little, and some muttered grumbling drifts his way; and after a while, almost too good to be true, peace descends. Contentedly, Juugo settles into it.

He has, admittedly, very little experience of being in a team. All the same, he's fairly certain that _long-overdue reprieve _is not how he should be thinking of his teammate finally ceasing to bother him; nor that _finally ceasing to bother him _is how he should be thinking of his teammate's natural and understandable need for rest, especially under the exhaustingly stressful circumstances of their mutual imprisonment. He should feel guilty, he imagines. He doesn't. He feels only tremendous, bone-deep relief.

.-.-.

* * *

.-.-.

Metal smacks against metal with a deafeningly solid clank, and Karin jolts awake into darkness and a single, wavering light. Beyond the bars of her cell is Sakura, lamp in hand; beside her is one of the prison guards, who is being scolded in a furious whisper. He's holding a kunai. There's a twist of guilt in his chakra. He must have cracked the blade against the bars to wake her.

"What _now_," she says, grumpily. Her cheek hurts. She probably fell asleep with her face resting on her photoframe again.

"Will you leave us alone?" Sakura asks the guard, and he does. Half-asleep and irritated, Karin's grudgingly impressed. "I'm sorry about the time - I have to be at work by daybreak, but I wanted to check in on you. Just - make sure you're doing okay. Is everything all right?"

Karin fumbles her glasses from beside her pillow and shoves them on. The frown creasing Sakura's forehead comes into relief, her face lit weirdly in the jumping light of her lamp, and Karin quickly, thoroughly inspects her chakra patterns: but there's not even a single knot of insincerity. She can almost _smell_ the honesty coming off her, warm and gentle, peach-pink waves.

Abruptly she slams down every defensive wall she's got. It's been weeks now, and she's worked it out: _this_ is how the Leaf attacks. They get you in the early hours when your mind is soft with sleep, and treat you with a preternatural kindness that'll get you wondering why you ever wanted to be free. They weaken you with what you want: friendship, and flushing toilets, and not getting tortured even a little bit.

Karin's got a life on the outside. She doesn't need this gentleness - she doesn't _want_ it.

"You're eating okay?" says Sakura.

"Fine," she says shortly.

"The food's - it's alright, is it?"

"It's gross."

"Probably just different from what you're used to," Sakura says. She's got a gaze the green of washed-out sea glass and it moves across her through the bars, soft and troubled.

Karin says nothing. Better to say nothing.

"Has something happened?"

_No_ - she nearly says it, and then she stops. She colours her voice uneasy. "Yeah. Kind of, yeah."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"A dream. I had - this dream."

Something clinical shutters down across Sakura's tone; her expression sharpens. "A bad one?"

"It was about Sasuke," Karin begins. She heaves a great, weary sigh. "About _me_ and Sasuke. We were in this bar we stopped by back in Cloud one time, but it was just us - the other two weren't there."

"Mm-hm," says Sakura, with the intensely focused look of a medic taking thorough mental notes.

"No team. No customers. No clothes."

The intensely focused look falters. "You don't have to do this," says Sakura.

"Just me and Sasuke getting up close and personal," Karin continues, raising her voice. "I'm talking _really_ personal, I'm talking _intimate_ - we knocked all the bottles off a table and just _went_ for it -"

"You _really_ don't have to do this," says Sakura.

"- and all his snakes were out, too - _writhing_ everywhere - and you met Orochimaru-sama, right? - because in _this_ dream it was _Sasuke_ with the extendable tongue, and let me tell you -"

"_Stop_ it!"

Karin's vigorous demonstration halts, abruptly. Sakura is gripping the steel handle of her lamp so tightly it seems close to breaking; its light jerks spasmodically across the walls. She looks furious. Her chakra looks furious, too. Karin's never seen something so pink get so angry.

"I won't say I understand exactly how you feel," Sakura says, after a moment, her voice barely steady, "but I do understand better than anyone else would. Okay? I _know_ it can be easier to pretend that nothing ever happened - than to accept that it did, and that he hurt you -"

"If you seriously think I wouldn't accept a dream as hot as _that_ -"

"To accept _what he's done_," says Sakura. She says it through her teeth. "To _us_."

Karin looks at her. Then she says, "I know what I want Sasuke to do to _me_ -" and Sakura makes an inarticulate sound of enraged frustration and slams her hand against the bars of the cell, hard enough to leave the imprint of her palm in the steel.

"You don't have to _do_ this for him!"

"It's _not_ for him," says Karin. The fact it happens to be true doesn't make her feel any less queasy. This conversation needs to end.

"I've heard about what you're like in interrogation," Sakura says. "But it's - this is a chance to cut him out your life. He's not _in_ your life anymore. You don't owe him _anything_."

"Okay," says Karin, and takes a breath. Then she spits, abruptly poisonous, "I'll accept all your bullshit when _you_ accept that Sasuke traded you in for a better model, how about it?"

There's a beat of silence.

"Like I'd give a shit what some jealous bitch thinks about mine and Sasuke's relationship," she presses on, vicious as she can, "what some scrawny loser's got to say about our _love_ - you think I want him out my life? You think you're gonna move back in where I left off?"

Sakura looks at her a moment longer. "I hope you start feeling better soon," she says, her tone neutral, and she turns away.

Karin watches the flicker of her lantern's light against the walls until it winks out and she's left sitting in the dark, bedsheets round her waist, listening to the vaguely adenoidal breathing of the guard. There's something sick and heavy clogging up the space inside her ribs. She's done far worse things than this. Getting some weedy pink kunoichi to leave her the fuck alone is nothing. It's nothing. Shame is a luxury for people who've got the freedom to afford it.

She's going to eviscerate Sasuke with his own sword, and she's gonna do it slowly.

She shoves her photoframe underneath her pillow and flops back down.

.-.-.

* * *

.-.-.

"What's that noise?"

Months spent learning calm at Sasuke's side have paid off. He breathes deeply.

Feet hit the floor in the next cell.

"Is that water?" Suigetsu demands, tone even sharper. "Juugo? Have you got water in there?"

Juugo closes his eyes. He breathes deeper. Then he opens his eyes, and continues.

Hands slap against bars. "Oi, has he got water in there? Did you guys give him extra? Why the fuck haven't I got more? I need it _way_ more than he does - he just needs it in the regular way, I've got physical _requirements_ -"

Juugo zips his fly and steps away from his latrine pot.

The noise from the next cell comes abruptly to an end. Then, just as abruptly, it resumes, now in the form of hysterical, out-of-control laughter. "I forgot - oh my God, I interrupted your piss, didn't I, I fucking _forgot_ - I've just been melting it out, saves the time -"

The samurai are playing cards today, dealing and shuffling with uncanny ease given the size of their iron gauntlets. They're ignoring Suigetsu entirely. Juugo resumes his position hunkered down against the wall and attempts, unsuccessfully, to do the same.

The laughter subsides, eventually; and for a while, there is peace. The respirators of the samurai rasp out their filtered air. Their plated armour clanks quietly with movement. There's the soft sound of playing cards fanning out, a gentle shuffle.

"Weird though, isn't it? That you gotta piss and I can just, like - work around it, if I want to. Don't you think?"

He had thought life in the southern hideout was hell. He had thought solitary confinement, him and his madness alone together, was hell. He had never considered that, perhaps, there might be a form of incarceration more hellish still.

Suigetsu's tone is conversational. Juugo is not ready for this conversation.


End file.
